Posts Tagged ‘rich’

Ask your liberal friends to finish this sentence: “If the rich get richer, the poor get ______.”

Betcha a dollar your liberal will reflexively say, “poorer.”

The problem is that that is simply not true. Unless an economy is a fixed sized pie such that if you get more of the pie, I by definition get less. And as I shall try to explain, that is NOTthe way a free market economy works.

The reality that liberals are too morally stupid to understand is that if I start a business, I start making my OWN pie. By starting a business and becoming successful, I’m not stealing from anyone and I’m not exploiting anybody; rather, in direct opposition to what Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren – the brains behind Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to go along with a genuine fake American Indian (read, “fake oppressed minority = fake victim”) believe – I AM BUILDING SOMETHING if I create a business. And no, you liberal dumbass, I am NOTstealing from somebody else; I am building something where there had been nothing before. I am putting a positive attitude that you have never had and will never understand into action and I am starting something.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.” — Charles R. Swindoll

That’s right, liberal. Nobody’s taken anything from you; nobody’s oppressed you; and the only reason that you’re a victim is because you have spent your life victimizing YOURSELF and allowing your messiah Obama and liberals like him to talk you into being a weak, useless human being. If you have the kind of positive attitude that Swindoll is describing, nothing is going to hold you down or hold you back – and the LAST thing you’re ever going to do is start whining like a liberal victim who is pathetic and cannot do anything unless government does it for you.

Here’s the thing: I’d love it if somebody asked Obama to complete that sentence I began with: If the become richer, the poor become ______. And after the Marxist said “poorer,” I’d ask him what he thinks Americans should do given the fact THAT AMERICANS HAVE ABOUT THE WEALTHIEST DAMN LIFESTYLE ON THE PLANET. I would demand that Obama explain on his view why Americans should redistribute trillions of dollars of American gross domestic product so that the desperately poor people in Africa and China and India and the Middle East and pretty much all over the damn planet could have more.

Here’s the thing. “If the rich get richer, the poor get poorer” the way liberals will invariably say, then what about the question, “If America gets richer, the rest of the world gets ______”??? How would the answer not be the same??? If America gets richer, then by liberal doctrine the rest of the world – particularly the poorest regions of the world – must necessarily get poorer.

Go to the Congo, where the GDP per capital is just $348. That means the average person is forced to live (“subsist” is probably more fitting) on the currency equivalent of just 348 dollars per year. That’s 29 bucks a month total. That’s living the good life on 95 cents a day. These people have NOTHING. They don’t have houses; they have tiny little shacks that they build from whatever they can find; they don’t have air conditioning or refrigerators or laundry machines or for that matter electricity or plumbing. Their kids don’t have disposable diapers. Because they’ve never tried the free market economics or limited government you liberals despise, they’ve got squat diddly butkus and they’ll never have anything BUT squat diddly butkus. And so hey, liberal poor person, unless you’ve never had more than $348 of welfare benefits or permanent unemployment benefits or allowance from daddy or however the hell you get your money and benefits in the course of a year, YOU DAMN WELL OWE THAT TRULY POOR SONOFABITCH IN THE CONGO. And by your own rhetoric if you don’t send pretty much everything you get to the Congo, to Liberia, etc. etc. etc., then you are a greedy one percenter and shame on you. You owe those poor people every single SCINTILLA as much as the rich guy in America owes YOU. And what you know if you’ve ever had an honest moment in your entire life is that you keep demanding somebody ELSE give to YOU but YOU’VE never given people who’d rejoice on a tiny fraction of what you’ve got SQUAT.

I’m talking to you, resident of Detroit’s poorest neighborhood. Because if you aint nearly starved to death you’ve got it FAR better than most of the population of the planet have it. And it’s damn time you quit reaching your hand out and being a liberal TAKER and instead putting it in your wallet and becoming a liberal GIVER.

I’m talking to you, you damn liberal socialist hypocrites. All you know how to do is justify redistribution when it applies to YOU or, in the case of liberal politicians, when it applies to your constituency as you pimp somebody else’s money in exchange for your damn votes so you can live like a fat cat like Charlie Rangel.

So a truly consistent liberal must therefore need to require America to lose wealth so the rest of the world can get richer instead.

So what’s Obama’s answer to the United Nations imposing a global tax? Is Obama going to say he’s against the people of the Congo getting richer? Then how DARE he allow America to produce more wealth?!?!? What’s YOUR answer for why YOU shouldn’t have to pay right out of your ass because if you live in America, then compared to the majority of people on earth, you are a greedy one percenter compared to them???

Like a bad sequel to a rotten horror movie, the debate over global taxation once again is rearing its ugly head — courtesy of the United Nations. And, despite lacking the requisite hockey mask and chain saw, the seemingly countless proposals for the imposition of global taxes are truly terrifying.

In July, Inter Presse news service reported that a top U.N. official was preparing a new study that will outline numerous global tax proposals to be considered by the General Assembly at its September meeting. The proposals will likely include everything from global taxes on e-mails and Internet use to a global gas tax and levies on airline travel. If adopted, American taxpayers could wind up paying hundreds of billions of dollars each year to the United Nations.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is among those leading the charge, having stated that he “strongly supports finding new sources of funding” for the U.N. through global taxes, according to Inter Presse. In fact, Annan made very clear his support for the imposition of global taxes in a 2001 Technical Note that he authored for a U.N. conference. “The need to finance the provision of global public goods in an increasingly globalized world also adds new urgency to the need for innovative new sources of financing,” Annan wrote. The Note goes on to describe and evaluate the merits of several global tax proposals.

Global tax proposals are not new. Various plans have been flitting around in academic circles and liberal and socialist think-tanks for decades. And while the United States and other developed nations have staved off such proposals in the past, third world nations have increasingly dominated the U.N. General Assembly by sheer numbers since 1970. As a result, they have begun to see promise in their quest to take and keep for themselves the wealth of citizens from nations like the United States — specifically using the term “redistribution.” Recent U.N. actions have also provided a new excuse and set the stage for the third world to not only renew its pursuit of global taxes but also hold out hope for eventual success.

A lot of conservatives hate using the good word “liberalism” to describe liberals. That’s because classical liberalism is actually a refutation of everything your progressive “liberal” Democrat stands for:

So if modern liberals aren’t really “liberals” at all, then what are they? They are a bunch of self-centered, greedy, narcissistic little whiners who harbor the basic worldview, “Everybody owes me something and forced redistribution is wonderful as long as its somebody else’s money that’s getting redistributed.” That’s what they are. They are people who have perverted the teachings of Christ and warped American history and the Constitution and system of government our founding fathers gave us to mandate socialism. Unless you can find where Jesus taught, “Rendering to Caesar ISrendering unto God.” Unless you can find where Jesus taught that a giant socialist government (or ANY kind of government for that matter) should forcibly seize and redistribute people’s property based on naked demagoguery and cynical political partisanship.

Hey, tell you what: just show me where Jesus taught, “If you earn less than $200,000 a year, you don’t have to give ANYTHING to the less fortunate; you get to use the raw power of government to take stuff from others so you can vote to redistribute it to yourselves.”

No, that’s not in the teachings of Jesus and it’s not in the writings of the founding fathers who forged a republic for Americans based on the principles of liberty and freedom.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” – Karl Marx

If you want to know where modern liberalism comes from, THAT’S WHERE IT COMES FROM.

Jesus never absolves the poor from giving; to the contrary, HE calls for the poor to give:

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” — Mark 12:41-44

So you aren’t off the hook any more than that rich guy you feel so self-righteous to hate and demonize and demagogue, poor liberal.

You, who judge and condemn the rich and demand the state confiscate more and ever more of what they work to earn, another teaching of Jesus applies to YOU:

“For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” — Matthew 7:2

It’s time you lived up to your own damn hypocritical rhetoric and slogans, you liberals (and especially you POOR liberals).

But don’t you worry, you pathological hypocrites who would never DREAM of paying taxes yourselves that you want everybody else to pay for YOU, if Obama gets reelected, HE’LL FORCE YOU TO REDISTRIBUTE YOUR WEALTH THE SAME WAY YOU WANTED HIM TO FORCE RICH PEOPLE TO REDISTRIBUTE THEIRS.

If the so-called “rich” don’t deserve their money because they’ve got more than you do, poor, stupid liberal; what the hell makes you think that YOU deserve YOUR money given that you’ve got a damn sight more than most of the world’s poor?

Somebody ought to take all your stuff away that the poor people in the Congo don’t have, have never had, and probably never WILL have (because the poorest countries are usually also the most socialistic countries and their failed economic system guarantees the constant destruction of wealth as corrupt government officials keep “redistributing” a shrinking economy into their own pockets). Because that’s “economic justice” by your own rhetoric.

You can’t win with what the left is saying. What they claim is guaranteed destruction and it is only bought by bad people who are selfish and greedy hypocrites who demand that somebody else should be forced to take responsibility for their failed lives.

The truth is this: Wealth is not a fixed-sized pie. The left is wrong; human creativity and ingenuity is such that people can always come along with new ideas that make them rich and create jobs for other people and improve the lives of other people who use their product or service. They won’t be getting rich at somebody else’s expense; they’ll be building a pie where no pie existed before and that pie will make the overall pie of an economy larger. If the rich get richer, other people can learn from that rich person’s example and be encouraged by it and also get richer. The left is simply flat-out wrong.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz told a training session of Jewish Democrats on Monday that Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has said that Republicans are dangerous to Israel because they criticize President Obama’s record. (Hat Tip: Memeorandum). In a statement issued by Israel’s embassy in Washington, Ambassador Oren categorically denies saying any such thing. In other words – at least according to Oren (and probably correctly) – the Chairlady of the Democratic party is a liar. This is from the first link.

The Florida congresswoman made the charge at a training session for Jewish Democrats held by the Obama campaign here at the Democratic National Convention, aimed at teaching Jewish Democrats how to convince their fellow Jews to vote for Obama.

Much of the session, which featured a string of speakers from the Obama campaign, was devoted to defending Obama’s record on Israel. During her talk, Wasserman Schultz said that Republicans, who “can’t get anywhere with our community on domestic issues” instead “do everything they can to lie and distort and mischaracterize this president’s stellar record on Israel.”

As she was wrapping up her remarks, she claimed that, “We know, and I’ve heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.”

…

Wasserman Schultz went on to elaborate that Republicans were “undermining Israel’s security by suggesting that the United States and Israel don’t have anything other than a unique and close and special relationship. It undermines Israel’s security to its neighbors in the Arab world and to its enemies. And we need to make sure that the fact that there has never been and will never be daylight between the two parties or the support for Israel that we have in the United States, that that is conveyed to Jewish Americans across this country. That’s our responsibility. It’s the responsibility we’re asking all of you to take on.”

She made similar remarks in a recent interview with Hadassah magazine.

It’s especially ironic for her to argue that Republican attacks were dangerous because they were creating a perception of “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel. Creating daylight was precisely the goal Obama adopted when he took office. As the Washington Post reported, a few months into his presidency, Obama told a group of Jewish leaders that the peace process didn’t advance during the prior administration because President Bush was too reflexively pro-Israel.

Oren denies the charge. This is from the second link.

The Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. has released a statement “categorically” denying Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s claim that he accused Republicans of being “dangerous for Israel.” The Washington Examiner earlier reported that at a Monday event here, Wasserman Schultz decried Republicans attacks on President Obama’s record on Israel, and insisted that, “We know, and I’ve heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.”

But the Israeli embassy has now released a statement from Ambassador Michael Oren responding to the Examiner report. “I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel,” the statement reads. “Bipartisan support is a paramount national interest for Israel, and we have great friends on both sides of the aisle.”

Gee, wasn’t it the Democrats who were complaining last year about Israel being made into a ‘wedge issue‘?

“Unfortunately, that comment was reported by a conservative newspaper–not surprising that they would deliberately misquote me,” Wasserman Schultz said.

Her statement for the record:

“I didn’t say he said that,” Wasserman Schultz insisted. “And unfortunately, that comment was reported by a conservative newspaper. It’s not surprising they would deliberately misquote me. What I always say is that unfortunately the Republicans have made Israel a political football, which is dangerous for Israel. And Ambassador Oren has said that we can’t ever suggest that there is any daylight between the two parties on Israel because there isn’t. And that that’s harmful to Israel. That’s what I said, and that is accurate.”

Yeah, you did SOsay it, Debbie, you blathering liar. You clearly demonize the Republicans EXACTLY as the paper reported. You are a liar. You have zero credibility. You should resign. Let’s see if MSNBC and CNN reports on that.

So there is simply no way around it: Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a liar and a terrible human being. Period. And the fact that this vile, dishonest psycho is the DNC chair is a screaming indictment against the party of lies.

And every single Democrat who supports this party is a dishonest liar by proxy as well as by result of your completely failed worldview.

Democrat dishonesty is pathological. And hypocrisy is their quintessential essence.

Democrats have been DEMONIZING Mitt Romney as rich. It didn’t matter to them when just-as rich-as-Mitt John Kerry ran for president in 2004. Nor does it matter that their candidate who ran for president in 2000 is worth over $100 million. To be a Democrat is to say, “It doesn’t matter to us if our guy is rich, but if your guy is rich he’s evil because being rich is evil and greedy.”

While publicly pledging to refuse corporate money, the official host committee for this week’s Democratic National Convention has quietly and aggressively courted corporate donors — using a sister nonprofit that has been offering firms special “sponsorship opportunities” if they ponied up $1 million or more to help cover the costs of the event.

A 13-page marketing brochure obtained by NBC News shows how New American City, a nonprofit that is closely affiliated with the official Democratic convention host committee, offered package deals to corporate contributors — with different benefits starting at levels of $100,000 and escalating to the top “Tryon Street Level” of $1 million.

The companies that reached the seven-figure level got “naming rights” at “villages” set up for a Charlotte street festival that opened up the convention, as well as guarantees that “your logo will be featured prominently.” The firms also got to put up banners and logos at other convention-related events — such as a delegate and media welcoming parties — as well as the chance to include their logos in gift bags that are being handed out to 6,000 delegates and over 15, 000 members of the media.

The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Now, stop and think about that: $500 billion. One state has an unfunded pension liability (thanks, unions!!!) of half a trillion dollars. And unlike the United States under Obama, California can’t just devalue its currency by printing more money until the inevitable collapse comes.

So with this history of abject liberal stupidity, it should come as absolutely no surprise that California – in spite of its being abundantly blessed with one of the greatest climates in the world, abundant natural resources and numerous major ports – would be utterly bankrupt:

If anyone is tired of the daily European soap opera with surrealistic tragicomic overtones, they can simply shift their gaze to the 8th largest economy in the world: the insolvent state of California, whose controller just told legislators has just over a month worth of cash left. From the Sacramento Bee: “California will run out of cash by early March if the state does not take swift action to find $3.3 billion through payment delays and borrowing, according to a letter state Controller John Chiang sent to state lawmakers today. The announcement is surprising since lawmakers previously believed the state had enough cash to last through the fiscal year that ends in June.” ….uh, oops? But sure, fix the problem of excess debt by more “borrowing” why not. As for the math: “But Chiang said additional cash management solutions are needed because state tax revenues are $2.6 billion less than what Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers assumed in their optimistic budget last year. Meanwhile, Chiang said, the state is spending $2.6 billion more than state leaders planned on.” Quick, someone come up with a plan that involves subsidies and tariffs on China, or something else that deflects from what the source of the problem really is. Because the last thing that anyone in America would want to bring up is this thing called “responsibility” for their actions, or, as in now becoming the default case, the lack thereof. And why do that, when time spent so much more productively scapegoating this, and blaming that for one’s own massive errors of judgment.

The Assembly budget committee is considering a bill today that would enable $865 million of borrowing from existing state accounts, Senate Bill 95. Chiang, after consultation with the Department of Finance and state Treasurer Bill Lockyer, is also seeking about $2.4 billion in delayed payments to universities, counties and Medi-Cal, as well as additional borrowing from outside investors.

Absent these actions, the state would fall below its prudent $2.5 billion cash cushion on Feb. 29, Chiang estimated. On March 8, the state would actually end up $730 million in the red. The state would be below the safe cash cushion for several weeks ending April 13, save for several days at the end of March.

With such actions, Chiang believes the state would not have to use IOUs or delay tax refunds, maneuvers that have been relied upon in previous years. But Chiang also said that “more cash solutions may be required if our revenues continue to erode or if disbursements significantly exceed estimates.”

So 3 years after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, everyone in the world continues to be terminally insolvent, but because everyone is in the same boat, everyone pretends not to notice and the best thing is just to blame Meredith Whitney for telling it like it is, if not getting the timing quite right? But at least the Fed isn’t about to print up a tsunami of dollar-equivalent ones and zeros.

California is one of the bluest – meaning most liberal – states in the country. It is the only state in the country, I believe, that actually INCREASED it’s level of total Democrat domination in the 2010 elections when people in virtually every other state finally wised up enough to vote Democrats out in the worst political asskicking in at least seventy years.

Murphy’s Law says “Everything east of the San Andreas fault will eventually plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.”

As cynical as Murphy was, even HE didn’t count on how incredibly stupid the Democrat Party would be in the state of California.

I imagine Obama is desperately hoping California can wallpaper over all of the enormous holes in its fiscal house until after the election. Otherwise he’d have to make the politically suicidal decision to either bail out California (and lose the rest of a legitimately angry nation that will have to pay for a “too big to fail” liberal state) or not bail out California and force the residents of the state to finally realize that liberalism is the best and surest path to self-destruction. Either way he would have to kiss his re-election chances good-bye.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed ballot initiative to raise taxes has wide support among California voters, but his path to victory in November remains far from certain, according to the results of a poll released Tuesday.

More than two-thirds of California’s likely voters say they favor the Democratic governor’s proposal to raise taxes as a way to stabilize state finances. Yet roughly the same proportion say they strongly disagree with a key element of that plan, raising the statewide sales tax, according to the Public Policy Institute of California survey.

The poll, conducted in mid-January, illustrates the difficulty the governor faces in navigating the state’s political cross-currents as he pushes his top priority for 2012.

Likely voters overwhelmingly say they favor raising taxes to pay for K-12 education and support raising income taxes on the wealthy, the cornerstones of the initiative Brown hopes to place on the November ballot. But they also do not want to raise the sales tax, believe the state could spend less money while maintaining the same level of services and are pessimistic about the direction of the economy.

“Therein lies the challenge for the governor,” said Mark Baldassare, president and chief executive of the Public Policy Institute. “He has some things he has attached to his tax initiative which do resonate with voters … but there are lots of other elements to question.”

Brown and his supporters have been cleared to gather petition signatures for his initiative, which the governor refers to as “The Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012.” His title does not refer to the temporary tax increases, which would raise between $4.8 billion and $7 billion a year.

The initiative would boost the statewide sales tax by half a cent for four years starting in January 2013. It also would raise the income tax rate on those making $250,000 a year, increasing it from 9.3 percent to a maximum of 11.3 percent, depending on the amount of income. The income tax increase would start in January 2013 and last for five years.

Most of the additional revenue would be dedicated to K-12 education, with much of the rest funding the governor’s plan to have counties house lower-level convicts who otherwise would have been sentenced to state prison.

Would I be in favor of seizing money from other people to force them to pay for the stuff I want? SURE! says the left.

Would I be in favor of actually giving up some of my own money for the stuff I want? HOW DARE YOU ASK ME TO SACRIFICE!!!

We live in a country in which the top five percent pay FIFTY PERCENT of the federal taxes, while the “bottom” fifty percent pay ZERO PERCENT of the federal taxes, and we’re told the rich don’t pay their “fair share.” Because liberalism and honesty are like slimy toxic oil and clean water and these simply do not mix.

When it is somebody’s ELSE’S money, there’s no problems and no questioning. Raise other peoples’ taxes! Yeah! When it is even a tiny percent of their own money, suddenly they’re saying, “The government wastes an awful lot of money and they could make do with a whole lot less, so….”

Benjamin Franklin had it right: he saw the day when America would vote for its own collapse as fifty percent plus one decided to vote itself the possessions of the few.

Several studies, including the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Rich States, Poor States,” and past reports by the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation have documented the movement of taxpayers from high tax to low tax states in recent years.

These studies present compelling evidence that taxes are the single largest factor in interstate migration, compared to factors such as climate, employment, family relocation, etc.

Our analysis takes this methodology one step further. Using data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), we calculated both the number of taxpayers migrating, and also calculated the adjusted gross income (AGI) that left the state as well. That is, we have calculated how much money—in terms of personal income—states lose or gain due to migration. Our findings confirm that taxpayers are leaving states with higher taxes and unfunded pension and healthcare liabilities.

Due to the ease of interstate movement, taxpayers can easily avoid higher taxes by moving to another state. As such, there is a significant Laffer effect wherein a rise in tax rates can lead to lower government revenues as individuals flee the state. There are nine states with no income tax – Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. In 2008 alone these states gained a net total of over 80,000 new residents from the other 41 states. These migrants brought with them over $900 million of net adjusted income according to IRS data.

In contrast, the ten states with the highest tax burden, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Vermont, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania lost around 129,455 residents and $10.2 billion of net-adjusted income in 2008 alone.

From 1998 through 2008, the ten states with the highest tax burden lost over 3 million residents. These residents took with them a staggering $92 billion in income.

[…]

It is also clear that individuals are aware that unfunded liabilities will eventually become taxes; states with large unfunded liabilities for public employee pensions and health care are seeing workers flee, particularly workers between ages 30 and 40, who are most likely to see future tax hikes.

In addition to higher levels of emigration, higher tax states also maintain higher unemployment rates, placing an expanding tax burden on a shrinking tax base. It is unsurprising, then, that the top five highest-tax states consistently have about a 0.5 percent higher unemployment rate than the five states with the lowest tax burden.

States that attempt to raise taxes to balance their budgets encourage their most productive citizens to find more welcoming homes. They also discourage productivity, as taxpayers get to keep less of what they earn in high-tax states. Worst of all, increased taxes provide government with the permission it needs to grow by sustaining the bloated spending of irresponsible state governments. Absent significant changes in their tax-and-spend schemes, these high tax states will soon find themselves without a populace to support the extravagant costs of living in those states.

That begs a good question: just what IS California’s liberal-created pension time bomb? I’m glad you asked:

The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Waving Mr. Buffett’s op-ed for all to see, Mr. Obama wasted no time in proposing a surtax on millionaires called the “Buffett Rule.” Putting aside all the oohing and ahhing over Mr. Buffett’s selflessness, his effective tax rate on his true income would hardly budge if this “Buffett Rule” were applied. What’s worse, raising the highest tax rates would most likely worsen the budget deficit and lead to a further weakening of the economy. Everyone would suffer.

The piece goes on to point out that Warren Buffett disingenuously understates his income by 250-fold. And Buffett’s “rule” wouldn’t touch 249/250ths of Buffett’s real income.

What we are being force fed by the Democrat Party and by the mainstream media who serve as their propagandaists is pure Marxist class warfare. And Marxism is a failed economic system for good reason.

California’s rich are leaving for lower-tax states. The state (slogan: “We’ll Owe You”) has among the highest tax regimes in the country, with a top marginal tax rate of 9.3% and an additional 1% tax on those earning $1 million or more a year.

Three states with no personal income taxes—Nevada, Texas, and Washington—are among the top five destinations for the highest-income fifth of California households, according to the Institutes own data.

Those states also are among the top destinations for California’s poor.

The real lesson here, in my view, is that high taxes and broken government chase away rich and poor alike.

But as long as there are Marxist liberals (and ALL liberals are Marxist liberals, because ALL liberals agree with the Marxist statement, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need“), screw the rich. And screw the poor who actually want a job and opportunity to improve their own lives too.

I have said it many times – and the reason I keep saying it is because it keeps proving true – that hypocrisy is the quintessential ingredient of a Democrat. If you took all of the hypocrisy out of a Democrat, he or she would simply cease to exist.

It didn’t matter that McCain didn’t actually own ANY houses (his wife owned them, with some of them being in a trust); it was just an opportunity for the media to dishonestly pile on top of a Republican and do what they do best – propaganda to demonize their ideological enemies.

Fast forward back four years prior to that, when John Kerry, the wealthiest man who ever ran for president, was campaigning. How many damn houses did HE own? Ooops. Somehow the media never dredged that up.

Notice that John McCain is nowhere on the list of the ten wealthiest candidates for president. John Edwards is. Bill Clinton is. Hillary Clinton is. Al Gore is. And John Kerry – the 2004 Democrat candidate for president – most assuredly is. But the issue of their wealth and how they got it doesn’t matter; only Mitt Romney’s does.

The Democrat Party and their mainstream media allies are crawling all over Mitt Romney’s tax returns to demagogue his tax rate. The figure 13.9% is raging; that’s the percentage the media claims Romney paid. They intentionally omit the fact that if you remove Romney’s charitable donations, he’s actually paying a rate of 42%.

What rate did John Kerry pay at? Oh, that doesn’t matter and never did because he’s a Democrat and therefore was immune to such inconvenient questions from the media propaganda? I’m oh-so very sorry for asking.

“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now … Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president’s news conference

“Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased – not a reduced – flow of revenues to the federal government.”

“In today’s economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarges the federal deficit – why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.”

“Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort – thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate.”

“A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues.”

– John F. Kennedy, Sept. 18, 1963, radio and television address to the nation on tax-reduction bill

“I have asked the secretary of the treasury to report by April 1 on whether present tax laws may be stimulating in undue amounts the flow of American capital to the industrial countries abroad through special preferential treatment.”

– John F. Kennedy, Feb. 6, 1961, message to Congress on gold and the balalnce of payments deficit

“In those countries where income taxes are lower than in the United States, the ability to defer the payment of U.S. tax by retaining income in the subsidiary companies provides a tax advantage for companies operating through overseas subsidiaries that is not available to companies operating solely in the United States. Many American investors properly made use of this deferral in the conduct of their foreign investment.”

“The present tax codes … inhibit the mobility and formation of capital, add complexities and inequities which undermine the morale of the taxpayer, and make tax avoidance rather than market factors a prime consideration in too many economic decisions.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 23, 1963, special message to Congress on tax reduction and reform

“In short, it is a paradoxical truth that … the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country’s own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, news conference

“The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.”

– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, special message to Congress on tax reduction and reform

“Expansion and modernization of the nation’s productive plant is essential to accelerate economic growth and to improve the international competitive position of American industry … An early stimulus to business investment will promote recovery and increase employment.”

– John F. Kennedy, Feb. 2, 1961, message on economic recovery

“We must start now to provide additional stimulus to the modernization of American industrial plants … I shall propose to the Congress a new tax incentive for businesses to expand their normal investment in plant and equipment.”

“A bill will be presented to the Congress for action next year. It will include an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in both corporate and personal income taxes. It will include long-needed tax reform that logic and equity demand … The billions of dollars this bill will place in the hands of the consumer and our businessmen will have both immediate and permanent benefits to our economy. Every dollar released from taxation that is spent or invested will help create a new job and a new salary. And these new jobs and new salaries can create other jobs and other salaries and more customers and more growth for an expanding American economy.”

– John F. Kennedy, Aug. 13, 1962, radio and television report on the state of the national economy

“This administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes … Next year’s tax bill should reduce personal as well as corporate income taxes, for those in the lower brackets, who are certain to spend their additional take-home pay, and for those in the middle and upper brackets, who can thereby be encouraged to undertake additional efforts and enabled to invest more capital … I am confident that the enactment of the right bill next year will in due course increase our gross national product by several times the amount of taxes actually cut.”

– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, news conference

But none of that matters to the media or to the modern Democrat Party – which embraced the communism that JFJK spent his presidency fighting – either.

Our mainstream media that gets to decide what stories get reported and fixated upon are the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. And they WILL NOT report fairly or add proper context to their stories to communicate the truth.

The beast is coming, and the mainstream media will ignore his personal wealth, too, as he rules over the human race as the man who will fulfill all of liberals and Democrats big government dreams.

I wrote an article damning Diane Sawyer for being a leftwing propagandist who used her interview with Gabrielle Giffords to demonize Sarah Palin. And I got this response:

Diane Sawyer is about as Right-Wing and Conservative as it gets. She never met a big business she didn’t let take her up the rump.

The issue here isn’t how Sarah Palin was defamed and demonized; it’s not even about how Diane Sawer defamed and demonized Sarah Palin. The issue is the idiotic notion that “right wing” or “conservative” people are in bed with big business, as opposed to the assertion that liberals are above such vile behavior.

Idiocy in general pisses me off; and when it’s liberal idiocy it pisses me off even more. So I responded:

You truly are ignorant, Mr. You Say. You have the most naive concept of “liberalism” imaginable. Every time I talk to a liberal, I walk away shaking my head in amazement at what fools you people are.

As a conservative, I want small, limited government that embraces laissez faire capitalism. Government and business aren’t in bed together under a conservative system; government isn’t taking in huge money from business because government has put itself in the position to make or break any business or any industry which forces businesses to make these giant political payoffs. No, it is YOUR LIBERALISM that guarantees that a giant big government that has all kinds of power can dictate all kinds of influence over business – and that business will therefore necessarily spend billions and billions of dollars to try to influence such an all-powerful government. I know that many Republicans cave in under a system that was “fundamentally transformed” by FDR and government unions running amok in every branch of government; but the fact of the matter is that we conservatives want government influence OUT of business and business’ crony capitalism OUT of government – while you liberals want more of both.

“I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said Jon, what do you think we should do,” Biden said. “The reason we called Jon is that we knew that he knew about the economy, about world markets, how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew. It was because he had been in the pit — because he had been in the furnace. And we trusted his judgment.”

Well, that’s got to be proof-positive that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are a pair of evil conservatives. Surely only a conservative would stand behind a man who would steal hundreds of millions of dollars from little people.

Either that or all of the bumper sticker slogans that stand in stead of liberal “thought” are totally full of crap, that is.

The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.

Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 21/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show.

So Obama is publicly denouncing Wall Street “fatcats” and claiming to stand with the little guy against said fatcats while in reality he’s rewarding them four times more than Bush ever did. A very “conservative” thing to do for a mindless liberal imbecile, I might add. Which only adds to the confusion surrounding the fact that for some reason these selfsame Wall Street fatcats gave Obama more campaign money in 2008 than they had ever given to any presidential candidate in the history of the planet:

The audacity is breathtaking.

The president has raised more money from Wall Street through the Democratic National Committee and his campaign account than any politician in American history. This year alone, he has raked in more cash from bank employees, hedge fund managers and financial services companies than all Republican candidates combined.

Even poor Mitt Romney was outraised by the Obama money machine at his former employer, Bain Capital, by a margin of 2 to 1.

It is a campaign operation whose wheels are greased by Wall Street bundlers like MF Global former chief, Jon Corzine. These financiers are so good at what they do that the Center for Responsive Politics reports that Obama’s Wall Street fundraising will “far surpass 2008 in terms of raw dollars and as a percentage of what he raises overall.”

That’s saying a lot considering that Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008 raised more money from the financial community than any other politician in American history.

According to Reuters, Wall Street accounted for 20 percent of the president’s campaign funds because of a massive cash haul from Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.

You can start to understand why I have such naked contempt for liberals. Every single thing they believe is nothing more than a self-serving, self-righteous hypocrite lie.

Take yet another example that is currently going on all around us: the “99 percenters versus the 1 percenters.” Just how stupid is that? I, for one, earn nowhere NEAR $250,000 a year. And yet I am hardly with those Occupy morons – just as the vast majority of the nation is not with them. On the other hand, look who IS with them and tell me if you actually believe that the American Nazi Party represents 99 percent of the American people.

Again, as a conservative, I don’t want a government so big and powerful – and having so much power to tax and regulate and make or break – that businesses must kowtow to such a government and attempt to bribe their way to favors. That’s what liberals want. They’re the ones who want an all-powerful government that doles out benefits and decides who wins and who loses. They’re the ones who created the present favoritism-based patronage system in the FDR years. And they’re the ones who are fighting the “good fight” to ensure that that patronage system doesn’t change one iota.

Wake up and grow up, Democrats. And stop spouting your demagogic Marxist class-warfare lies. Because the actual facts point a damning finger at YOU.

At the center of his tiny, shriveled little cockroach soul, Barack Obama is a Marxist.

Allow me to recite the central tenet of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And please, PLEASE someone explain to me how Barack Obama and the modern Democrat Party are NOT Marxist given that they believe the SAME garbage. Liberals constantly huff at the suggestion that they are socialists as though it is the silliest damn thing they have ever heard. The thing is that they don’t want their ideology identified with socialism merely because it is a bad word. BUT “IT” IS A BAD WORD FOR A REASON, AND “IT” IS IN FACT PRECISELY WHAT THEY ARE.

Over the past several weeks, America has seen on grand display in Washington a singular mindset emanating from the White House: We must raise taxes so that we can keep on spending. This week, though, America was treated to something different—a glimpse inside President Barack Obama’s mind, a roadmap of his economic worldview. And what was revealed was a philosophy that is fundamentally at odds with America’s job creators.

That insight came during the President’s press conference on Monday in which he broached the subject of raising taxes as part of the debt limit deal:

“And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.”

If you read between the lines, which doesn’t take much decoding, President Obama effectively believes that any income you have which you don’t “need” belongs to the government, as writer John Steele Gordon explains in Commentary. And, Gordon writes, Obama’s statement “demonstrates an astonishing economic illiteracy”:

To be sure, someone earning a great deal of money has an income greater than what he spends. . . But, unlike Scrooge McDuck, the rich do not put the excess in a vast money bin and frolic about in it. They invest it. What a concept! Where does Obama think new capital comes from, the tooth fairy?

How much income is too much? It’s hard to say, and the President doesn’t put a number on it. But that high-tax policy is so important to the President that he is willing to personalize the issue, offering up the fact that he has made a boatload selling books and can afford to pay taxes on it, as he did in his Twitter town hall when he remarked:

“But what I’ve also said is people like me who have been incredibly fortunate, mainly because a lot of folks bought my book . . . for me to be able to go back to the tax rate that existed under Bill Clinton, to pay a couple of extra percentage points so that I can make sure that seniors still have Medicare or kids still have Head Start, that makes sense to me.”

On top of personalizing the issue, the President is pulling out all the stops in a take-no-prisoners demagoguery campaign, ranging from the subtle to the explicit. His criticisms of tax loopholes for corporate jets and oil and gas companies are legion, his calls for millionaires and billionaires to “pay a little bit more” are anything but subtle, and his threats over the failure to reach a tax-soaked debt limit deal are frightening.

The President’s “your money is the government’s money” mindset is having an impact on the mind’s of America’s job creators. A new survey of small business owners and executives prepared for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shows how the U.S. political environment has impacted the business environment, and the insights are troubling.

According to the survey, a vast majority of small business owners (84 percent) say the U.S. economy is on the wrong track. Tellingly, the threat of regulation and taxes are the two issues in Washington posing the greatest threat to their business, while economic uncertainty, America’s growing debt and deficit and Obamacare are top challenges as well. And when asked whether they’d like Washington to lend a hand or get out of they, 79 percent choose the latter.

And therein lies the difference. When President Obama sees successful businesses, he sees green. And when they look back, they see red. The President wants to take more so he can spend more and do more, whereas those who are the engine of America’s economy just want the government to do less so they can thrive. Unfortunately, a meeting of the minds seems a long way off.

Democrats are at their hearts Marxists and fascists who believe that you and everything you produce belongs to the government – and that the government should belong entirely to THEM so that they have the power to decide who wins and who loses. I’ve written about this fact at length before. Again, this is a central tenet of Marxism and socialism, but for some reason we’re not supposed to be able to call these people what they clearly are.

Mind you, this disgraceful little turd Barry Hussein is a HYPOCRITE Marxist, as the following evidence of what a stingy, selfish, greedy little swine Obama was with his own money just a few short years ago when he was a rich liberal who didn’t think anyone was watching. Amazingly, the facts show that Obama didn’t seem to think there was such a thing as “money he didn’t need” then:

Prior to his run for President, Barack and Michelle Obama were in the top 2% of income earners, but actually gave less than the average American in charitable giving.

Obama gave .4% of his income. In spite of being rich, and being in the top richest 2% of Americans, Obama gave only $1,050 to charity. When the average American household (that’s mostly us in the bottom 98%) gave $1,872, which was 2.2% of their incomes.

Obama seemed to “need” every penny of his money when he was selfishly refusing to give basically ANYTHING to the poor that he now so hypocritically and self-righteously claims he cares about. And that is a FACT. So when this vile little hypocrite weasel self-righteously lectures us on how much we should be willing to give more in taxes to Big Brother, just realize it is coming from the very worst kind of demagogue and liar.

Then there’s the fact that if these rich liberals want to give more money, THEN THEY CAN AND SHOULD GIVE MORE MONEY. They can give to charity; they can give to a government fund that uses the money to pay down the debt when they do their taxes. They keep talking about how generous they should be but they never seem to be generous with their own money.

And then you find that as cheap and chintzy and stingy and selfish as the redistribution of wealth president (a.k.a. Barry Hussein) was before he decided to run for president, his vice president was even STINGIER. Because Joe Biden gave less than one-eighth of one percent of his wealth to charity.

And, of course, Democrats who lecture us on “paying our fair share” while they either welch on their debts, refuse to contribute to charity, cheat on their taxes, or all damn three are a dime a dozen. Let’s have a few prominent examples: Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have largely welched on Hillary’s campaign debts. There’s Charlie Rangel, the man who chaired the committee that wrote the tax laws while not bothering to pay his own damn taxes. There’s “Turbo Tax” Timothy Geithner, the man in charge of the Treasury and I.R.S. who didn’t bother to pay his own taxes. There’s former Democrat candidate for president John Kerry, a millionaire, who tried to wriggle away like the worm he is from paying the taxes he should have paid on his yacht. There’s Kerry’s wife and fellow Democrat Teresa Heinz-Kerry, who in spite of inheriting the Heinz fortune actually pays less in taxes than the median American family. And then there’s a bunch of more garden variety cockroach Democrats such as Eric Holder, Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, and Claire McCaskill. And don’t forget the vile putrid bunch of Democrats running Bell, California.

And let me throw in “San Fran Nan” Nancy Pelosi into the mix. Here’s an already filthy rich woman who increased her wealth by 62% last year while millions of Americans are suffering. She’d certainly be one who would say, “Screw America, screw the American people and screw the unemployment rate; I’m getting MINE.

These people just make me want to lose my lunch into a bucket. That’s something I wouldn’t mind donating to the government.

I once quoted Burton Folsom in his great book “New Deal Or Raw Deal?” It’s time to quote that passage again:

Throughout American history, right from the start, charity had been a state and local function. Civic leaders, local clergy, and private citizens, evaluated the legitimacy of people’s need in their communities or counties; churches and other organizations could then provide food, shelter, and clothing to help victims of fires or women abandoned by drunken husbands. Most Americans believed that the face-to-face encounters of givers and receivers of charity benefited both groups. It created just the right amount of uplift and relief, and discouraged laziness and a poor work ethic.

The Founders saw all relief as local and voluntary, and the Constitution gave no federal role for the government in providing charity. James Madison, in defending the Constitution, observed, “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” In other words, if relief, and other areas, were made functions of the federal government, the process would become politicized and politicians and deadbeats could conspire to trade votes for food” (New Deal or Raw Deal, page 76-77).

Prior to FDR, the American people took care of their OWN, family by family, town by town, county by county, state by state. They had NEVER had welfare, and in fact found the very concept of welfare distasteful. And I’m going to tell you right now that they were better, stronger people than we are as a result of that moral superiority and that faith in THE PEOPLE and not the GOVERNMENT.

Barack Obama – who gave virtually NOTHING to charity when giving would have demonstrated the character he proved he DIDN’T have – doesn’t trust the American people, or much care about them, for that matter. He doesn’t want to help people; he wants to grow the size of government. He wants only to make the state bigger and bigger and more and more powerful and controlling. Obama is angry because he doesn’t believe people should have the right to decide for themselves how much of their own money they “need”; HE wants to make that decision for them and then impose it on them so he can seize their money and redistribute it to people who will vote for him and for his party.

Whenever a Democrat calls for more taxes, understand that what they are really saying is that they believe that the government is too small and needs to become larger. And whenever they call for more taxes for the sake of helping people, what they are really saying is that you are a bad and immoral person who can’t and shouldn’t be trusted to help people in need and that it is better to take your money away from you and put it into the coffers of a big government socialist redistributionist agency which will piss it away on boondoggle programs that benefit the politically connected far more than they do the poor. And the fact that even as Barack Obama and the overwhelming Democrat majority that had dictatorial control of both branches of Congress made government bigger than it has ever been and yet blacks are now worse off than they’ve been for generations and women are being set way back is the icing on the cake of the proof of that fact. Liberals hurt the people they cynically and falsely claim to be helping – and then demagogically use the misery that they themselves created to accumulate even more power for themselves and their failed agenda.

If you think the rich are evil and greedy, then why do you not think that if they get their taxes raised, they won’t just pass those taxes onto you in the form of higher prices?

Here’s the thing about taxes on the rich: all the rich would have to pay them, and all the rich would have their taxes increased by the same percentage, and they would all have their taxes increased at the same time.

If you raise the taxes of the rich (who own and run all the businesses), you wouldn’t get everyone raising their prices right away, nor would they all raise their prices by the same amount. But every single owner and chief executive is going to face the same increase of cost in doing business. And over time – if there is anything in the universe called “equilibrium” – they will raise their prices for their products to compensate for that higher cost of doing business.

And given that the 2nd law of thermodynamics – which is ALL ABOUT a system’s tendency to reach equilibrium – is one of the best attested principles of science, I would argue that voting to raise taxes on the people who run the businesses is pretty much a 100% guarantee that you will be raising taxes on yourself via higher prices.

The only businesses that will suffer, and the only “rich people” who will lose their “riches,” will be the smaller small businesses who don’t have the resources to last through the transition period which will ultimately end with the customers paying the higher prices and thus the higher taxes. Businesses will pass their higher taxes onto the consumers who buy their products.

Think of automotive tires. Let’s say you increase the taxes of every single tire producer and dealer by 10%. Do you seriously not think that, over time, you won’t end up paying the lion’s share of that 10% increase in higher prices for tires? And it frankly doesn’t matter what product or service we’re talking about. If you want the lowest prices, keep taxes down and the government off the backs of the producers, distributors and sellers, and allow them to have a fair fight with each other to compete for your business.

In 1980, the top 1 percent of earners paid 19 percent of income taxes, and the bottom half of earners paid 7.1 percent. A decade later, with a lower maximum rate, the top 1 percent paid 25 percent of taxes, while the bottom earners paid just 5.8 percent. By 2008, top earners paid 38 percent of taxes, the bottom half 2.7 percent.

The rich are now paying more than they would have paid, not less, after the Bush investment tax cuts. For example, the Treasury’s estimate was that the top 1 percent of earners would pay 31 percent of taxes if the Bush cuts did not go into effect; with the cuts, they actually paid 37 per­cent. Similarly, the share of the top 10 percent of earners was estimated at 63 percent without the cuts; they actually paid 68 percent.

Which is to say that if I really hated people who weren’t rich, I would show my hate by raising the tax rates of the rich.

It’s a Charlie Brown thing. As long as that bald fool keeps thinking he’s going to kick the football with Lucy holding it, he’s going to keep ending up flat on his back in pain.

In a war, in a game of strategy, or in many sports, the very best and most ruthless way to win is to make your opponent think that if he does X he will gain an advantage. But the moment he does X, you seize the advantage and destroy him. And as long as the poorer classes keep falling for this Marxist demagogic class warfare trick, they’re going to keep screwing themselves.

There are a number of reasons for why keeping low tax rates for the rich results in their paying a higher percentage of taxes paid. Most basically, if you allow the rich to keep more of their profits, they will invest more and take more risks. And the result is more opportunity and more jobs for all. If you demagogue the rich and try to seize more of their profits, they will shelter their money and act in ways that hurt the overall economy and most definitely hurt the poor.

So, if you allow Barack Obama to be your Lucy and trick you into trying to kick the rich, all you’re going to end up doing is hurting yourself and hurting the economy. You’re going to end up flat on your back just like Charlie Brown, and Obama as Lucy will keep playing the same trick on you over and over again.

We need to balance our insane budget deficit, Democrats say. And it’s time the rich paid their fair share.

All the top 10% of earners paid is 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government. That’s nothing. It’s those poor poor who suffer the most. The bottom 50% have to pay a whole bunch of nothing. It’s just brutal for them every April. They want to write a check to the government, but only the rich get to do stuff like that. And the bottom 40% are so screwed by our federal income tax system that they actually are forced to accept free money in addition to paying a whole bunch of nothing. Unless the Associated Press is lying about it.

Nothing makes me more annoyed than the phrase “give the rich tax cuts.” Because it presumes that the government owns us and graciously allows us to keep some of what we earn. The way liberals understand things, they own all the means of production. They own my labor and whatever I earn from my labor. And I am lucky if the commissars allow me to keep enough to feed myself. It derives from a tenant of Marxism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” At the core is central planning; government stands above us, it stands above God (which is why consistent Marxists deny God exists and religion is merely an opiate of the masses), and government should redistribute everything according to its divine power.

That is the intrinsic logic of their view that allowing the rich or anyone else to keep more of their own money is considered a cost to the government. But it ISN’T a cost to the government to allow me to keep more of my own money; anymore than it is a cost to me to allow my next door neighbor to keep more of his own tools.

Obama gave an address in which he paid lip service to reducing spending – even though his budget that he released only TWO MONTHS AGO didn’t reduce any spending at all – and in fact stated that it would be dangerous to do so. Obama has no plans to cut spending; in fact, the deficit in just the first six months of this year shot up another 15.7%. Obama is going to do what he’s been doing since he started running for president; he’s going to offer meaningless rhetorical platitudes about cutting spending and reducing costs, while demonizing the rich and demanding that the ONLY people who pay REALLY START TO PAY.

We don’t know exactly what Barack Obama is going to say when he fires up his teleprompters at George Washington University tomorrow. The color, we do know, however: it’s red, as in “red ink,” what Mitch Daniels at his speech at CPAC earlier this year called “the new red menace.” (I like to think that the invocation of the old “red menace,” the Communist, socialist one, was deliberate: it is, I would argue, apt.)

The substance of the speech, as ABC notes, is “closely held.” Everybody thinks that there will be at least pro forma acknowledgement that spending on such programs as Medicare and Social Security needs to be reined in. But the big O will also return to one of his favorite themes, a by-word from his 2008 campaign: “increased taxes on the wealthy” (that’s according to “White House officials”).

Here’s my bet: the operative word in Obama’s speech tomorrow night, the mantra that will be repeated endlessly not only by O but also by the left-wing commentariat, is “fairness.” You remember his campaign shtick: the Saddleback Church event, for example, when Rick Warren asked candidates John McCain and B.O. about taxes. “Define rich,” he asked. McCain tossed out an income of $5 million, which elicited derision. But the gravamen of his response came in the elaboration: “I don’t want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich.”

How different was B.O.’s response: What he was looking for, he said, was “a sense of balance, and fairness in our tax code. It is time for folks like me who make more than $250,000 to pay our fair share.”

“Our fair share.” That, as I noted at the time, is B.O.’s refrain. “[W]e will save Social Security for future generations by asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.” It’s a small step from the invocation of “our fair share” to Obama’s call for a tax on “the windfall profits of oil companies,” a tax increase on capitals gains, elimination of the tax on Social Security tax, etc., etc.

The crucial point here is that what Obama is interested in is not increasing revenue but in promulgating redistributionist policies that make it harder for people to prosper economically. William McGurn, writing in The Wall Street Journal back then, recalled Obama’s response to ABC’s Charlie Gibson when Gibson observed that raising taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

[I]t doesn’t really matter whether a tax increase actually brings in more revenue. It’s not about robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Robbing from the rich will do, especially if it’s done in the name of fairness.

Now there are good reasons Mr. Obama is not likely to pursue the revenue side of the fairness question. As this newspaper noted in a recent editorial, the latest data from the Internal Revenue Service does not show to Mr. Obama’s advantage. As we come to the end of the Bush administration, the top 1% of American taxpayers already pay 40% of all income taxes — the highest level in 40 years. The top 10% of income earners pay 71% of the taxes.

The bottom line is that when Obama invokes “fairness,” he wants us to feel guilty about economic success. This is the secret of his appeal to the socialistically inclined.

It worked in 2008. Let’s see how it goes down tomorrow. Over the last two years, Barack Obama has presided over an economic Armageddon. Everyone knows about that $14 trillion that is the federal debt. Few people, I suspect, really appreciate what that unimaginable figure represents. And the kicker is, $14 trillion is only a tithe of the trouble. As Kevin Williamson and others have pointed out, the country’s real debt, when you facotr in state indebtedness and unfunded so-called “entitlement” liabilities, is closer to $130 trillion. That horror-movie figure is just too awful to contemplate, so I will draw a veil.

[…]

For the record, I wrote an article entitled, “Tax Cuts Increase Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues,” in which I documented that every single time the United States has reduced the income tax rate, federal revenues have gone up. I go back to Warren Harding to document that. I include John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush – who increased federal revenues by lowering tax rates.

But this recurring documented fact of U.S. history is tantamount to rocket science to liberals. Because they adhere to the entirely unrealistic premise that if I were to double your taxes, I would collect double the revenue, because people wouldn’t react to the tax increase by altering their behavior.

Americans are taking rising gas prices seriously. They’re already driving less, “reversing what had been a steady increase in demand for fuel,” the Associated Press writes. “For five weeks in a row, they have bought less gas than they did a year ago.”

The average price of gas is an obvious indicator of why national fuel consumption is dropping. At the end of March, AAA reported that gas reached an average of $3.60 nationally. Today, AAA says the national average is $3.79 for regular grade, a 29 cent jump in about two weeks. Business Week reports that many analysts forecast that these numbers will worsen, and expect that consumers could pay as much as $5 a gallon this year due to political unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, which supply much of the United States’ oil. The $5 per gallon speculation has been floating around the industry for some time, but last year, CNN stated that former president of Shell Oil, John Hofmeister predicted that Americans could pay $5 a gallon by 2012. Analysts have bumped that date up.

“Drivers are already reacting to the change,” writes Kicking Tires. “In the first week of April, consumption was down 3.6%, or 2.4 million gallons of gasoline,” based on data from MasterCard Spending Pulse.

One of the best ways to combat rising gas prices is to drive less, but there are other simple things you can do. […]

Even uneducated, ignorant and frankly stupid people understand this incredibly basic concept: cost goes up, activity goes down. And yet you have liberals with PhDs staffing agencies such as the Congressional Budget Office utterly fail to understand that if they make taxes go up, they will end up with reactions that will invariably produce less revenue for the government.

If even high-school dropouts understand that if the price of gasoline goes up, they need to drive less, how is it that brilliant businessmen won’t realize that if their tax rates go up, they need to protect their money?

Here’s another analogy that might be spot on the money. Suppose your going to work and a mugger jumps you and takes all your money. As he’s walking off, counting your (well, his now) cash, he says, “I hope you’ve got as much dough tomorrow, because I’m going to mug you again.” Now, if you’re smart, you won’t be happening by that way at all the next day. But if you’ve absolutely got to go that way to get to work, will you have as much money that next day? Not if you’ve got a single functioning brain cell. On my analogy, if you figure out some other way to get to work, that’s tax avoidance. If you stash your cash somewhere so you don’t have it for the robber to take, that’s tax sheltering. And if you’re too stupid to understand that this is what people do when their taxes go up, that’s liberalism.

The more taxes increase, the more activities that were previously not worth doing – such as sheltering assets, moving assets overseas, investing in collectibles, purchasing tax-exempt investment vehicles, or just dodging taxes – become worth doing.

And so,what happens every single time happens yet again. Raise taxes expecting more revenue, get less revenue, and hurt the economy in the process by penalizing productivity and investment risk and thereby restricting growth. And when you encourage growth by reducing the tax burden and allowing people to keep what they earn, lo and behold, cetaris parabis, there is a surge in activity, an increase in economic growth and a corresponding increase in federal tax revenue.

I say “cetaris parabis” because if you throw in a socialist Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that undermine something as vital as our housing mortgage market by imposing morally and fiscally insane policies until the system comes crashing down, such as what occurred leading up the crash in 2008, the best tax rates in the world can’t save the system.

Here are just a few articles I wrote on that subject, in order of date written with the earliest listed first:

We need to have intelligent economic policies. If we don’t have such policies, we’re going to struggle regardless of our tax rates.

Quickly, another liberal policy that will not even possibly work is the Federal Reserve QE2 (that’s the second shot at quantitative easing) that artificially reduces interest rates by artificially increasing the money supply in order to increase lending.

Here’s the problem with that. Short term, it might seem to work. The stock market looks at the apparent backstopping of our economy and follows the leader (Uncle Sam) up until the ship starts to sink. After which they will sell, sell, sell. But the ship ALWAYS sinks. Why? Because you have a lot more dollars chasing after the same supply of finite goods and services (if anything, in the last few years, we have a LOWER supply of finite goods and services). So what happens? More dollars chasing less stuff. That’s inflation. It will INVARIABLY require more devalued dollars to buy the same things. The more you inflate the money supply, the worse that inflation gets. And we have massively increased our money supply.

An increase in the money supply is rather like an overdose of drugs. And in this case the effect of the overdose will be hyperinflation. Basically, the moment we have any kind of genuine recovery, our staggering deficit is going to begin to create an ultimately gigantic inflation rate. Why? Because we have massively artificially increased our money supply beyond our ability to actually produce real wealth, and that means that money will ultimately be devalued. There’s simply no way it can’t be. If simply printing money solved financial problems, the government could just mail everyone several million dollars, and we could all retire. The problem is that more money chasing a limited supply of goods simply pushes up prices higher and higher without doing anything to solve the underlying economic problems. If we have a recovery, with increased economic activity, there will be increased demand on the money supply, forcing an upward climb in interest rates as a means of controlling the currency. And then we’ll begin to seriously pay for Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s sins. Paradoxically, the only thing preventing hyperinflation now is the recession, because people aren’t buying anything and therefore aren’t competing for those limited goods.

And let me point out that we’re looking at huge inflation now – even as Obama declares victory over the recession – in insanely rising gas prices, food prices, clothes prices, all prices:

This phenomenon is going on all over the world because most of the world is tied to the U.S. dollar – the currency that Obama has been poisoning hoping for short-term political gains.

And, again, a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts (which doesn’t help businesses and individuals who are desperately searching for consistency so they can predict their costs) is not going to help us out of this kind of moral and fiscal insanity.

But what we are going to see is Obama now demagoguing all the massive economic failure that his own policies are responsible for creating in the first place to demand that the rich “pay their fair share.”

Here’s one for you to put in your pipe to smoke on. Even if the U.S. were to seize the wealth of the entire planet, and even if we taxed all the wealth of not only the rich but the miserably poor as well, we STILL couldn’t pay off the debts that Democrats demand that we keep adding to until after we’ve reached that “straw that broke the camel’s back” point:

As the Obama administration prepares to finance a Fiscal Year 2011 budget deficit expected to top $1.6 trillion, the American public is largely unaware that the true negative net worth of the federal government reached $76.3 trillion last year.

That figure was five times the 2010 gross domestic product of the United States and exceeded the estimated gross domestic product for the world by approximately $14.4 trillion.

“As government obligations continue to spiral out of control and the U.S. government shows no willingness to make the magnitude of spending cuts required to return to fiscal responsible, the U.S. economy is headed to a great collapse coming in the form of a hyper-inflationary great depression,” says economist John Williams, author of the website Government Shadow Statistics.

The difference between the $1.3 trillion “official” 2010 federal budget deficit numbers and the $5.3 trillion budget deficit based on data reported in the 2010 Financial Report of the United States Government is that the official budget deficit is calculated on a cash basis, where all tax receipts, including Social Security tax receipts, are used to pay government liabilities as they occur.

The calculations in the 2010 Financial Report are calculated on a GAAP basis (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) that includes year-for-year changes in the net present value of unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Under cash accounting, the government makes no provision for future Social Security and Medicare benefits in the year in which those benefits accrue.

“The broad GAAP-based federal deficits, including the Social Security and Medicare unfunded liabilities, have been in the $4 trillion to $5 trillion range in 2008 and 2009, and 2010’s deficit again likely was near $5 trillion, remaining both uncontrollable and unsustainable,” Williams wrote.

“The federal government cannot cover such an annual shortfall by raising taxes, as there are not enough untaxed wages and salaries or corporate profits to do so,” he warned.

In his analysis of the 2010 Financial Report of the United States, Williams listed both an official accounting and an alternative.

“The estimate of a broad 2010 GAAP-based deficit at $5 trillion is mine,” he noted. “At issue with the published report, consistent year-to-year accounting was not shown, with a large, one time reduction in reported 2010 Medicare liabilities, based on overly optimistic assumptions of the impact from recently enacted health care legislation.”

U.S. Government GAAP Accounting Federal Budget Deficits U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the United States, 2002-2010 (John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics, ShadowStats.com)

Williams argues the total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, have effectively placed the U.S. government in bankruptcy, even before we take into consideration any future and continuing social welfare obligations that may be embedded within the Obama administration’s planned massive overhaul of health care.

“The government cannot raise taxes high enough to bring the budget into balance,” Williams said. “You could tax 100 percent of everyone’s income and 100 percent of corporate profits and the U.S. government would still be showing a federal budget deficit on a GAAP accounting basis.”

Williams argues the U.S. government has condemned the U.S. dollar to “a hyperinflationary grave” by taking on debt obligations that will never be covered by raising taxes and/or by severely slashing government spending that has become politically untouchable.

“Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover obligations,” he cautioned. “The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have committed the system to its ultimate insolvency, through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency.”

He is concerned that the Federal Reserve will supplement its current policy of Quantitative Easing 2, or QE2, under which the Fed intends to purchase by mid-year 2010 another $600 billion of Treasury debt with “QE3.”

“These actions (QE2 and QE3) should pummel heavily the U.S. dollar’s exchange rate against other major currencies,” he concludes. “Looming with uncertain timing is a panicked dollar dumping and dumping of dollar-denominated paper assets, which remains the most likely event as a proximal trigger for the onset of hyperinflation in the near-term.”

Williams predicts that the early stages of hyperinflation will be marked by an accelerating upturn in consumer prices, a pattern that has already begun to unfold in response to QE2.

“For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving wealth and assets,” he advises.

Williams suggests that physical gold in the form of sovereign coins priced near bullion prices remains the primary hedge in terms of preserving the purchasing power of the dollar, as well as stronger major currencies such as the Swiss franc, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar.

And as totally insane as that is, it might well even be worse than that.

$61.936 trillion sounds like a lot. And that’s the official figure for the International Monetary Fund’s estimate for U.S. indebtedness. But the IMF is giving credibility to a figure that makes that $62 trillion seem almost manageable:

Republicans are trying to get our spending under control, and Democrats are demonizing them every single step of the way. Because Democrats are demons, and demonizing is the only thing they know how to do.

For the record, Republicans are trying to cut an amount which is basically 1/30th of Obama’s budget deficit.

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

It is DEMOCRATS (I call them “Demoncrats,” for “Demonic Bureaucrats”) who want to implode America and kill tens of millions of American people by plunging this country into a great depression that will make the last one in the 1930s seem like a fun-filled day at the beach.

It’s not going to be the richest people who starve to death and die miserably in the cold. It’s going to be all the people liberals love to say they care about – when in reality all they do is cynically manipulate them toward their own increasingly certain doom.

If you have a true death wish, and you vote Democrat, then by all means keep doing so, because they will give you the destruction and nihilism that you seek. That’s the real meaning of Obama’s “hope and change.”